Facebook calls these ads Sponsored Stories. To create them, Facebook essentially repurposes users' status updates and activities to hawk an advertiser's products or services. Once you , check in at a merchant location, post an update mentioning a product, service, or company, or otherwise interact with a Facebook advertiser, your activity becomes potential fodder for that company's ad. Your friends could then receive an update informing them of your activity--whether you want Facebook to share it or not.

The upshot? A single click could make you that advertiser's newest spokesperson. And since you can't opt out, you really can't do anything about it.

In a video on Facebook's site, a product manager notes that the Stories go only to your friends, and they aren't getting anything you haven't already sent them. True, but isn't there a difference between your recommending a movie to your friends, and Facebook taking it upon itself to do so?

Plus, the Sponsored Stories don't always take context into account. Consider the case of , who made a funny post about an Amazon ad for a 55-gallon drum of "personal lubricant." Next thing he knew, he was in ads hawking the lube to his friends. One pal told Bergus he saw the ad every time he logged in to Facebook.

If Sponsored Stories were to stay in the ticker feed, where they're relatively easy to ignore or hide, they might not be such a big deal. Unfortunately, as of this writing, Facebook's ads-masquerading-as-updates are no longer confined to the low-rent ticker district. Facebook has started subtly releasing them into users' news feeds, and that could be a bigger issue for a lot more users.